What a pity, I thought last week, as I watched television images of feral mobs trashing parts of London and other cities that the word goonda has never been adopted in Britain. A pity too, I’ll add, though policing is hardly my business, that the lathi, as a physical object, hasn’t either; ugly its use may be, but it works.
Back with language, it’s true that the British goonda, did he linguistically exist, would pretty certainly not be, as he might be in India, the hired tool of some politician. But that resonance apart, the word expresses very accurately the mixture of semi-organized collective violence, vandalism and crime pervading too many of Britain’s city streets last week. And British English has no real equivalent.
The American mobster is no substitute: he belongs to the Mafia, and the Mob does not organize mobs. As for gangster, the man may belong to a gang, but the word is seldom used except in films (or, oddly, by some British gang members speaking of themselves). The likeliest British word is thug; another word of Indian origin, curiously, though I doubt that one in a hundred of its British users is aware of that. But thug by now is far too wide; it can mean a man apt merely to smash up other drinkers’ faces, or, more seriously, his wife’s. So let goonda one day reign, as it yet may, if Britain’s ethnic Indians start speaking up.
Whatever they did to the streets, the rioters, in the event, altered little in British linguistic habits. Various youths complained to the media that they are habitually “dissed”, disrespected; which is clearly true, if they were black, as their vocabulary suggested, though they were not so clear why smashing into shops to steal television sets and smartphones would make it less true. But by now diss is old hat even to us oldies. Another youth demanded “recognition”, all four syllables of it, his face masked up to the eyeballs to prevent any such thing.
New to me — at 77, I’m behind the times — was the use of the feds, as in federal marshal or FBI, for the police. One gormless ninny urged his followers on Twitter to “rise up” across London and “beat the feds”. This particular ninny (forgive the anglicisms, but, as I demonstrated in an earlier column, British English is rich in words of personal insult, so why not use them?) turned out to be a man normally hired to write blogs on behalf of The Independent newspaper. The Indy, as its too few readers know it, is a paper of stern liberal-left principles, but even it felt this too much, and swiftly sacked him.
You might think rise up an interesting new phrase for torching and looting your local shops. And we heard uprising from another ninny — forgive me, a self-promoted “black activist” better known for his activities on the edge of public finance under a past far-left mayor of London — who, maybe, thinks Britain a second Syria. But I can’t see these novelties making much ground. And to judge from the reactions, blogged or reported, of non-rioting Britons, black, brown or white, few will think that they should.
No, this month’s nights of madness will leave little mark on the language. A few events of the past have done so. We owe marathon to a confused tale of a Greco-Persian battle in 490 BC; turn a Nelson’s eye to the way that admiral put his blind eye to his telescope, so as not to see a flagged order to withdraw at the battle of Copenhagen in 1801; met his Waterloo (usually with a capital W, but sometimes not) to Napoleon’s defeat in 1815; boycott to Irish peasants’ reaction in 1880 to a landowner’s agent of that name; the now forgotten mafficking, noisy rejoicing, back-formed into the verb maffick, to the British relief of Mafeking from a Boer siege in 1900; blitz, noun or verb, to the German bombing of London in 1940-41 (and, briefly, coventrate to the similar treatment of a smaller city, Coventry). But August 2011 will not join the list.
